InDesign CS3: Mastering Design Collaboration

When Book File Collaboration Won’t Work

The Book File Collaboration Workflow has one hard rule–in order for auto­mat­ic page num­ber­ing and uni­fied out­put to work, each com­po­nent doc­u­ment must com­prise strict­ly con­tigu­ous pages with no blank or extra­ne­ous pages. For mag­a­zines, news­pa­pers, newslet­ters, mag­a­logs, and oth­er doc­u­ments where sto­ries jump, paus­ing on a par­tic­u­lar page, skip­ping oth­er con­tent pages, and then pick­ing up again far­ther into the pub­li­ca­tion, the one rule of book file col­lab­o­ra­tion could be a prob­lem. (If your pub­li­ca­tion doesn’t jump sto­ries, it’s not a prob­lem.) InDesign can’t thread a sin­gle, con­tin­u­ous sto­ry across mul­ti­ple doc­u­ments; thread­ed frames may only be in the same doc­u­ment. Therefore, if a fea­ture arti­cle jumps from page 19 to page 32, you’re left with a dilem­ma. You have a choice between four pos­si­ble solu­tions for that dilemma:

1. Make pages 19–32 one doc­u­ment, inclu­sive off all con­tent pages between, thus mak­ing it impos­si­ble for more than one design­er to work at any giv­en time on any page between 19 and 32.

2. Make pages 19–32 one doc­u­ment, but leave blank any pages not direct­ly part of the sin­gle fea­ture sto­ry. Any inter­ven­ing pages and sec­tions are still their own sep­a­rate doc­u­ments, enabling oth­er design­ers to work inde­pen­dent­ly and con­cur­rent­ly on their respec­tive pieces. This method isn’t new–it’s what mag­a­zines and oth­er peri­od­i­cals typ­i­cal­ly employ. There are two down­sides to this method: auto­mat­ic page num­ber­ing goes hay­wire because of the extra­ne­ous pages, and it forces extra pag­i­na­tion work and a greater poten­tial for mis­takes imme­di­ate­ly before going to press.

Many com­po­nent doc­u­ments using this method include numer­ous pages that serve no func­tion oth­er than as place­hold­ers for con­tent on which some­one else is work­ing. When the pages are locked down, just before the issue is put to bed, some­one has to sit down and either com­bine all the com­po­nents into a sin­gle doc­u­ment via drag and drop or go through each doc­u­ment, print­ing or export­ing con­tent pages man­u­al­ly while ignor­ing place­hold­er pages. When pages are export­ed to PDF, EPS, or anoth­er for­mat, the numer­ous result­ing files are then either com­bined into a sin­gle doc­u­ment (for instance, one large PDF), imposed in-house into a sin­gle doc­u­ment, or named after their page num­bers and sent out for impo­si­tion (where­upon some­one hopes very, very hard that the impos­er doesn’t make a mistake).

3. Continue with the Book File Collaboration Workflow, mak­ing page 19 one file, page 32 anoth­er, and divid­ing the inter­ven­ing pages as need­ed and inde­pen­dent­ly of the jumped sto­ry. In that case, the sto­ry is man­u­al­ly bro­ken on page 19, with its last line tweaked and a jumpline insert­ed, and then the over­flow copy is added man­u­al­ly and inde­pen­dent­ly to page 32, again, with a man­u­al­ly insert­ed and main­tained Continued From jumpline. Last-minute edits to the sto­ry or to the lay­out that affect sto­ry com­po­si­tion require edit­ing two doc­u­ments instead of one.

4. Augment or replace the Book File Collaboration Workflow with a dif­fer­ent method­ol­o­gy. See if your work­flow can employ the InCopy LiveEdit Workflow (Adobe’s term, not mine) or the Placed Page Collaboration Workflow (I am pret­ty sure I’m the first to coin this one, so please send me a nick­el every time you use it) or both. I’ll dis­cuss both of these method­olo­gies below–the lat­ter in the very next sec­tion, “One Page, Many Designers,” and the for­mer a few pages hence in the sec­tion “Collaborating with Editorial.”

Just to be clear: If your pub­li­ca­tion doesn’t jump sto­ries out­side the pages assigned to each cre­ative, you can use the Book File Collaboration Workflow with­out the afore­men­tioned prob­lem. Do still read the rest of this chap­ter, though, as none of these method­olo­gies is nec­es­sar­i­ly exclu­sive of the others.

One Page, Many Designers

Yesterday there was a one-to-one, one-designer-to-one-page, rela­tion­ship so inflex­i­ble it may as well have been cast in iron. Today, the par­a­digm has shift­ed. Now, with InDesign CS3, a many-to-one rela­tion­ship is pos­si­ble. Many design­ers may work simul­ta­ne­ous­ly on one page–or, more accu­rate­ly, on por­tions of the same page. In Figure 12.2 you’ll see a flow­chart dia­gram­ming an exam­ple of what I’ve dubbed the Placed Page Collaboration Workflow.

Figure 12.2 Diagram of a Placed Page Collaboration Workflow in use on a sin­gle page

In the dia­gram, a single-page mag­a­log lay­out is divid­ed into three sep­a­rate areas. Three sep­a­rate design­ers will work con­cur­rent­ly, one on each area, all nev­er leav­ing InDesign. Rachael (the red­head), is respon­si­ble for copy­fit­ting and set­ting the six prod­uct list­ings in the mid­dle of the page, while Carlos (in the mid­dle) takes care of design­ing the side­bar and fea­ture box. Kim (at the bot­tom with the pony­tail) is the lead design­er on the page, so she’s design­ing the back­ground imagery and set­ting the head­line, deck, page intro­duc­to­ry para­graph, and sta­t­ic ele­ments like the folio. Previously, try­ing to split the work on one page among three design­ers meant each would have to take a turn, each one wait­ing to begin work until the last has fin­ished. All three design­ers under this sce­nario are work­ing con­cur­rent­ly, on the same page, in InDesign.

The prin­ci­ple is sim­ple, one with which you’re already inti­mate­ly famil­iar. Let’s look at the basics of your cur­rent workflow.

If you work on advertising-supported pub­li­ca­tions, for instance, you almost cer­tain­ly accept PDF or EPS press-ready ads from agen­cies, right? Someone far away designs an ad, FTPs it to you, and you drop it as is into the appro­pri­ate slot in your lay­out. If you don’t accept out­side cre­ative into your lay­outs, you do cre­ate ele­ments and sec­tions of at least some pages in Photoshop or Illustrator. That art­work (or agency art) is placed into InDesign as a linked asset. Should the asset need to be altered, it’s edit­ed in its native appli­ca­tion and the link mere­ly updat­ed in InDesign. Thus, while you’re work­ing on the com­posed page in InDesign, some­one else could be work­ing at the same moment and inde­pen­dent­ly in Illustrator on the pie chart for page 6. Neither of you will hin­der the other’s work because, as a linked asset, that AI or PDF pie chart is a whol­ly sep­a­rate doc­u­ment from your INDD lay­out. You do this day in and day out with placed assets, so you know how it works.

Now, sub­sti­tute anoth­er INDD file for the AI or PDF. Instead of a pie chart, page 6 con­tains a table or oth­er ele­ments bet­ter done in InDesign than out­side it. InDesign CS3 now accepts oth­er InDesign files as placed and linked assets. That’s what Rachael, Carlos, and Kim are doing. Each is work­ing in InDesign on a sep­a­rate INDD or INX doc­u­ment. The final, com­pos­it­ed page in the Figure 12.2 flow­chart is a fourth doc­u­ment (or not; maybe Carlos is work­ing in the mas­ter while Rachael’s and Kim’s pieces will be placed into his doc­u­ment). For the sake of argu­ment, let’s assume a fourth doc­u­ment col­lects the three design­er­s’ sep­a­rate doc­u­ments. The com­pos­i­tor uses File > Place or drag and drop from Bridge, Finder, or Explorer to import the design­er­s’ three sep­a­rate INDD files exact­ly as he would a trio of TIFFs, PSDs, PDFs, or what­ev­er. The placed assets are then arranged to form the com­pos­ite page–just like pages you lay out every day with images and art­work cre­at­ed out­side InDesign. That’s the Placed Page Collaboration Workflow.

Another cool aspect of com­posit­ing a page by plac­ing INDD files is that the compositor’s tasks of man­u­al asset posi­tion­ing and trans­form­ing can be com­plete­ly elim­i­nat­ed. Glance again at Figure 12.2, pay­ing par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to the com­po­nent pieces. Notice that they’re all the same size and, except for Kim’s back­ground, con­tain copi­ous white space. Each piece is the exact size of the final page. If your com­pos­it­ed INDD doc­u­ment is 8.5×11 inch­es, make each page asset 8.5×11 inch­es. The bound­ing box of each placed page will then also be 8.5×11 inch­es. Not only does that enable each design­er to work with a sense of how his work fits into the page as a whole, it also means the asset can be placed with min­i­mal posi­tion­ing work. Rachael’s, Carlos’s, and Kim’s art can all be placed at the same time, aligned to each other’s top and left edges with two quick clicks of but­tons on the Control pan­el or Align pan­el, and then eas­i­ly posi­tioned to the 0,0 ori­gin. No one has to zoom in and pre­cise­ly posi­tion the pieces to one anoth­er because they are all the same size, ready to align per­fect­ly with one anoth­er. Cropping is unnec­es­sary, too, because emp­ty space on the InDesign doc­u­ment page is trans­par­ent; each asset will show through the neg­a­tive space in the one above it. They’ll even blend with each oth­er if trans­paren­cy or blend­ing modes are used. In my flow­chart, the black back­ground of Carlos’s side­bar is set to a Multiply blend­ing mode at 85%. When it over­lays the fin­ger­print image in Kim’s sec­tion of the page, the side­bar will enable the white fin­ger­print ridges to show through as 85% black ridges. The red fea­ture box also blends with the oth­er part of the fin­ger­print via anoth­er blend­ing mode.

How do I know what every­one else is doing? You can’t lay out a page in a vac­u­um. Again, InDesign CS3 can place oth­er InDesign files as assets. So, to keep abreast of what every­one else is doing in his por­tion of the page, place each page com­po­nent doc­u­ment on the paste­board. Assuming every­one is work­ing from files stored on a net­work serv­er acces­si­ble by all, Rachael can place on her paste­board Carlos’s and Kim’s INDD doc­u­ments, Carlos can place Rachael’s and Kim’s, and so on. When any one of them saves the doc­u­ment, InDesign will noti­fy the oth­ers that the linked asset has been changed and ask if the link should be updat­ed. If you’ve got a good group of peo­ple fas­tid­i­ous enough to clean up after them­selves, they can even place the oth­er design­er­s’ doc­u­ments on the page instead of the paste­board. The effect then is that three peo­ple are all work­ing simul­ta­ne­ous­ly on the com­pos­ite lay­out. (Fair warn­ing: It can be a lit­tle creepy at first to watch parts of your page change as if by super­nat­ur­al means.)

Next: Solving the Problem with Book File Collaboration